DxD: Celeste 8

DxD: Celeste 8

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Commissioned by Althero and Chaosbrain

Wordcount: 2000

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The Hero Faction in its full might was something to behold.

According to Sheridan and mom, though, they were a terrifying piece of work. They were a bunch of humans that had real power in their hands in the form of Sacred Gears and magic, and they used that power to do whatever they wanted. Hunting reserves filled with Beast Tribe people, assassinations and destabilizations of entire empires, and aid in leading the world towards a global conflict were just the beginning.

Their goal was to turn humanity into the apex race of existence, above Angels, Devils, and Fallen, let alone ghouls and other species that thrived on the planet. Not only that, but they didn’t think normal humans were worth their time too. If you couldn’t use magic, if you didn’t have a Sacred Gear, and if you didn’t have anything that could contribute to their goals, then you were just a weak part of the population that needed to be culled. They worked on making superhumans, carefully bred their heirs, and educated them to be even more horrible than themselves.

If they got what they wanted while CORE was growing and expanding, they would’ve helped set off a terrible apocalypse that would’ve ended most modern regimes, and become the de facto rulers of the survivors. They’d control the food, the education, and the training of the new generation of humans in their dimensional bases, which they would use as staging grounds to begin fighting against their former allies in Ouroboros, as their former allies would seek to destroy them in turn.

A snake devouring its tail was really the perfect symbol for those people.

The Hero Faction would’ve turned humanity into something unrecognizable. A harsh, unforgiving species built upon mercilessness and power, which sought to subjugate or destroy all those they deemed lesser. Over countless centuries, and even millennia, their work would’ve created a stronger, leaner, and mightier humanity utterly stripped of what made them human, which would stand tall upon the broken bodies and corpses of all the other races.

I was ready to find and destroy those people in this world.

Instead, I found myself kicking around a bunch of kids with Longinus barely being used to their full capacity.

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The True Longinus, Annihilation Maker, and Dimension Lost were powerful Sacred Gears in the right hands with well-trained people. I would know, because I fought against their wielders back home.

Azille was a freak of nature with the True Longinus and he completely mastered it within just a few decades of waking it up. According to Sheridan, just a few years after they met, Azille used the True Longinus to turn aside an entire fleet of the Church. Then, in the following years, he was recruited as humanity’s trump card against most foes, and he never failed once in any of his missions while also having a family and leading his tribe to the modern era. Fighting against Azille was like fighting against an unstoppable artillery shell that you could barely harm, which sometimes liked to teleport, and if it hit you… you’ll start struggling just to stay alive, while your soul threatens to slip out of your body.

I never fought against Annihilation Maker, but Li did, and it sounded terrifying. The user could just flat-out create massive creatures that could fight against young Aspects. Not Li, though, because he was a bunch of bullshit, but anyone else would’ve had trouble against the literal titans of hellfire that Annihilation Maker conjured up. There were also the Annihilation Drakes, which Ouroboros literally used as living bombs capable of tangoing against Ultimate-class teams of fighters and killing anything else below them.

Finally, as for Dimension Lost, there was Ulrich and even if she didn’t like fighting, she knew how to fight with the best of them. She started off as just a teleporter, but eventually got to learn how to start sending parts of things elsewhere with a thought, and that made her a menace to fight against. She could be anywhere she wanted in the near vicinity, and she could see you, she could set her Dimensional Fog at you and if it touched you start sending chunks and pieces of you everywhere. She could wipe countries off the map with ease, and it took a special brand of overpowered (Li, Val, etc.) to handle her with any reliability.

I prepared to fight people like them. Years of experience and training backing up the strongest Sacred Gears. Not only that, but in this world, Sacred Gears could mutate, the powers they contained could influence them, and they grew stronger with time, because the “me” here died before he could finish things off. So, I was ready to fight against those three Longinus at their absolute strongest and more, while they were supported by a bunch of other Longinus users that were probably stronger than they should’ve been too.

But, again, I found myself dealing with a bunch of kids playing at being the monsters I was hunting down.

…

I had to give them some credit.

They would win against Azazel, if they worked together perfectly, didn’t have egos, and a perfect tactician on their side. The power to do damage was present amongst the teens, and it was completely possible for them to hurt me, but in the end, they couldn’t do anything from the moment I engaged them because I was seriously overprepared for them.

The wielder of the True Longinus was skilled and capable, but he certainly wasn’t on par with Azille.

I wasn’t seeing much ability in regards to turning aside an entire crusading fleet of the Church.

This dimension’s True Longinus user used the weapon like any decent warrior would. If you only needed to land one hit to kill something, and could rely on your weapon to not break, then you tended towards looking for ways to just get hits in. In a one-on-one fight, he’d be a deadly opponent since it took entire lifetimes to fix up every opening a person could possibly have, but I was never the type to fight one-on-one. He was fast, had great reflexes, and pretty tough, but the sheer threat that I was expecting wasn’t there.

My opening salvo, launched right after I found him and his group, was actually proving effective because of this.

Back in my world, hitting the Hero Faction of Ouroboros with a few hundred cruise missiles would’ve jut pissed them off. Even with Drone supported VTOL aircraft armed with chainguns, lasers, and spinal-mounted rail-guns, they’d have barely been threatened. The Hero Faction would’ve mustered their troops, called on their champions, and wiped out conventional forces with ease. They had select advantages that needed to be overcome before any conventional military could hope to fight against them and have a chance at winning, and here they had the True Longinus, so I intended my first strike against them to be a probing attack.

Here, my targets were getting swept up in the tide and struggling.

They were a hardy bunch of people, obviously trained in using magic to defend themselves and strengthen their bodies in a fight, but there was only so much firepower anyone could take. They tore through my first waves of missiles after contact, setting up a perimeter, and mustering a defense against my attacks while their magic-users searched for their attacker and as Dimension Lost evaded, searched, and blocked what he could. Annihilation Maker made small creatures made of shadow that engaged my VTOL Drones, but they weren’t on the tier of Annihilation Drakes, and it took a swarm of them to take one down… and even then the Drone’s self-destruct mechanism took the swarm out.

The True Longinus user, meanwhile, was at point with the defense and struck down the missiles with blazing speed and easily overcame the attacks I sent his way. The problem was that was all he could do, and wasn’t carving through it all and giving his people an opening to exploit, so that he could march onward after they did.

It was my first engagement with them, yet they were already being suppressed, and if I hit them with the rest of what I had then I would surely beat them.

It was too easy.

So easy that I almost breathed a sigh of relief as magic interfered with my communication system and something came through.

“Who are you!? Why are you doing this?” A bespectacled young man yelled at me from one of my holographic interfaces on my ship. It was an isolated system meant to be exploited by my enemies, so if they made the effort to make contact, I’d hear them. It also analyzed their breakthrough technique and let my security systems figure it out, study it, and make a defense against it. It killed two birds with one stone. “Who the hell are you!?”

The fact that I was unknown to them wasn’t a surprise, but I welcomed the fact that I was, because that made things easier.

“Who I am is irrelevant. I disagree with your goals and I believe that it's best to destroy you. Surrender and I will take your Sacred Gears, lock away your magic, and allow you to retain your lives.” Azazel was looking into Sacred Gears in this dimension instead of messing with Homunculi. He told me he did it to get his hands on some more firepower, but I was sure that he saw that it was unfinished and was putting together the first steps towards finishing it up. He was a good kid. “So, surrender or be destroyed.”

The black-haired, bespectacled wielder of Dimension Lost glared at me through his skin with a large grimace on his lips.

He didn’t even need to say a word to refuse.

“Cao Cao!” He called out a name and the True Longinus user leapt back from the front to let the other Sacred Gear users take the front. They barely managed to hold the tide back, but they did, and the True Longinus user came beside the user of Dimension Lost. The screen that he exploited grew a bit blurry and a mist came out of it. “Now!”

The True Longinus user’s spear blurred forward and surged towards me from the viewscreen… and came through with the help of Dimension Lost.

It was a good, surprising tactic… if I hadn’t seen and fought against Ulrich before, and hadn’t fought against Azille as well.

With those two facts put into consideration, the end result was simple.

I caught the True Longinus with my thumb and forefinger whilst avoiding the edges completely, while staying seated. Doing it made me feel pretty badass, and judging from the shock and terror on Cao Cao and Dimension Lost wielder’s faces, I was sure that I looked pretty scary to them as well.

Cao Cao tried to take his weapon back, but found that he couldn’t, so he made it disappear and resummoned it a moment later.

Dimension Lost’s fog started to eat the screen that it was coming out of, but I cut the connection off with a thought, and took that as his decision.

Still, I was sure he hadn’t relayed my offer to the rest of his people, so I decided it was time to unveil my true strength and spoke to my bridge’s AI.

“Deactivate the stealth field. Engage all weapons. Raise all defenses… and bring us close enough for them to hear.” I stood up to the helm of my Vimana and looked over what I had left. Just one percent of my munitions were expended and little more than a tenth of my VTOLs were launched. My main weapons were ready to be fired and I was sure that they could handle whatever these people had. “Let’s give them one last chance, before blowing them to bits.”

My current ship was a slapdash design, but I built it from the ground up, and it worked well enough.

I’d have a chance at making Li use Occisor with this ship.

Needless to say, these wannabees had little chance against it.